Behind the Glass Walls

We give you the nuts-and-bolts view of the Labs and a preview of our new corporate LAN testing setup.

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Odds are that if you read PC Magazine you have some knowledge of PC Magazine Labs and what we do here. But there's a lot of hidden infrastructure inside our nearly 8,000-square-foot facility. Here's some of what goes into making a world-class product-testing lab.

Because of the temperature-sensitive nature of our equipment and the large number of test machines, we needed to supplement our building's air conditioning system with a 60-ton unit dedicated solely to the Labs area. We also have a set of three 5-ton units installed as a backup, in case the 60-ton unit or the building system fails.

PC Magazine Labs' goal is to inform our readers about the strengths and weaknesses of products and services. To that end, our testing methodologies must be accurate, appropriate, and reproducible. They must also have real-world value. For network services and infrastructure, this means that we test under real-world conditions rather than relying entirely on a battery of artificial tests. Benchmark tests definitely have their place and are indispensable for testing PCs, servers, and hardware, but often they are not sufficient for network-related products and services. For that reason, we recently began developing a compact corporate LAN environment, which will let us perform extensive tests on a variety of networking equipment and services under more realistic conditions.

We began with a basic outline for a multitier network. A Web server, a file server, and a database server were the first components. We are currently operating an Apache 1.3.19 Web server on Red Hat Linux 7.1 and running IIS 5 on Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server 5. For database solutions, we use Microsoft SQL 7.0 as well as MySQL 3.23, and we intend to add Oracle8i soon. Windows 2000 Advanced Server also acts as a file server. On the Linux box, Samba 2.2 provides file services.

Two mail servers--Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 and qmail 1.03, which run on different platforms--serve our virtual company's e-mail needs. Because application servers are increasing in popularity, we are integrating an IBM WebSphere solution into our setup. For server hardware, we chose the Dell PowerEdge 2550 with redundant power supplies, 2GB of RAM, integrated Gigabit Ethernet, and Ultra3 SCSI. We configured all of the PowerEdge's disks for RAID 1.

To more closely duplicate a real environment, we also installed security devices, such as a WatchGuard Firebox II firewall and a Nokia CC2500 VPN concentrator. For our Web servers, the Rainbow CryptoSwift eCommerce Accelerator EN and two NetScaler 3000-series HTTP/TCP accelerators speed up transactions and manage connections. HP Procurve and Extreme Networks Summit switches supply ports for all connections, and redundant 1.5-Mbps SDSL lines connect us with the outside world.

Our efforts to improve and expand our test-bed raised the important question of how to test--more specifically, how to generate the traffic for testing. We integrated three devices into the setup to accomplish this task: the Ixia 1600 network load generator (www.ixiacom.com), a Caw WebAvalanche Web traffic generator (www.caw.com), and a Shunra Storm network emulator (www.shunra.com). The Ixia 1600 takes excellent care of Layer 2 and Layer 3 traffic generation and equipment testing, with the Caw WebAvalanche used for higher-layer testing and for generating traffic on our Web servers. We used the Caw device in our recent testing of VPNs ("Safe Passage"). The Shunra Storm device can emulate multiple WAN connections at the same time and can introduce latency, packet loss, bit error, and dynamic-routing effects. Besides these powerful devices, we use a permanent 60-node workstation setup to run eTesting Labs' benchmark programs, such as NetBench and WebBench.

What does all this mean to our readers? Essentially, this cutting-edge facility enables PC Magazine's Network Infrastructure team to test the gamut of network devices--accelerators, cable modems, concentrators, DSL modems, firewalls, routers, security tools, switches, and VPN access solutions--without the overhead of creating a test environment for every story. And all of PC Magazine Labs' teams will now have a realistic corporate infrastructure to use when testing their products. This will be especially beneficial when our Software and Internet Services teams test application servers, content-filtering products, databases, and security products. In the end, we are confident that our attention to detail and our implementation of real-world testing will benefit readers by making our stories more interesting, more thorough, and more authoritative.